Dinara Tengri

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Author: Rebecca Skloot Year of publishing: 2010 Published by: Crown Publishing Group Henrietta Lacks, as HeLa, is known to present-day scientists for her cells from cervical cancer. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells were taken without her knowledge and still live decades after her death. Cells descended from her may weigh more than 50M metric tons.  HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks was buried in an unmarked grave. The journey starts in the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s, her small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo. Today are stark white labora...

Welcome back to Top Ten Tuesday, a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish . This week's topic is Back To School. For some, school means math. Lots and lots of math. And science. But neither have to be a reason for anxiety if you just find the right book or the right person to break them down to you gently. Here are ten books and Youtube channels that make math and science simple and exciting for us mere mortals . Books   1. The Maths Handbook: Everyday Maths Made Simple , by Richard Elwes The title is pretty self-explanatory. And it's true too. There was a time when I feared and hated math. This book was one of the things that changed that. 2. The Simpsons And Their Mathematical Secrets , by Simon Singh The fact that so many of the original writers on The Simpsons have math degrees just makes me love this show more. In this book, Singh tells us how these bright individuals ended up in the Simpsons' writers room, and explains some of the m...

I love Dana Scully of the X-files.  I can't help being drawn to this character like a moth to a very bright light. She's awesome . In short, this post is a loud and self-satisfying rant about the awesomeness and badassery of Dana Scully. More specifically, it's an essay about how Scully's skeptical and scientific viewpoint helps Mulder fight the supernatural. In the future, I'm going to write a more in-depth analysis of the role that Scully's science plays on the X-files. For now, I'm going to settle on listing five episodes, in which lives were saved thanks to Scully and her science. I always get so annoyed when people are saying, "Why can't Scully just believe in the paranormal? The evidence is right in front of her!" To those people I say, "What evidence?" You can loose your mind trying to count the times when Scully and Mulder fail to solve a case, and to present any substantial evidence to the FBI (somet...